Interior Design and Furnishing a New Home

I'll be moving into a new home in half a year and will be bringing very little furniture, decorations, etc. with me. I want to have a classic, elegance to the inside with brown being the main/base color. Where do I begin? Where can I look for examples? Where's the best place to buy furniture and other items needed to finish a condo?

I would think you can find pretty much anything your looking for on the internet. If not, you are going to have a hard time designing your own home I good place to start is look into Susan Susanka and her books. She highlights a lot of bungalow features that a well thought out but not particularly modern. I like the idea of efficient spaces that don't necessarily have to be modern.

Go to the library or Barnes and Noble and leaf through some interior design books. Pretty quickly you'll identify your own personal style (modern, classic, traditional American, etc.) From there you should try to buy pieces that will fit into that particular aesthetic. Here are a few of my design tips:

- As much as possible, save up and buy nice articles. That doesn't mean sitting on an Ikea chair for 18 months until you save up enough for a 7K Barcelona chair, but it also means not going to Ikea and spending 2K on crap just so you can fill a room.

- Stay conservative for the main pieces of furniture in a room (i.e. armchair, couch, coffee tables) and then get creative with accessories and accent pieces (ottomans, porcelain and ceramics, textiles, pillows, etc.)

- Find a color palate you are comfortable with and then mix patterns. Patterns don't really clash, only colors do.

A lot of what you can do will be determined by your budget and the size of your house. If you just bought a two story house and you have 5K to decorate, it's either going to look very minimalist or be filled with rather crappy pieces. 5K for a 1 bedroom apartment can go a long ways though.

Probably up to about $20k for a 2 bedroom condo.
Would sticking to a brown/white theme be good?

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White is good for some accents...not sure I'd ever have it as a large focus, especially with furniture or flooring; too hard to keep clean and maintain. You'd be worried about marking nice, white stuff.

I usually find Apartment Therapy to be terrible. Just a bunch of young adults with generic tastes showing off their bungalows. It 95% mid-century modern done poorly. And once in a blue moon when someone with a nice house shows it off, they are savaged by all the frustrated, poor readers for being "too showy".

I 'm more of a fan of checking out people like Eric Cohler, Thomas O'Brien, or Jeffrey Billhuber and then trying to make a more affordable version of their spaces.

I usually find Apartment Therapy to be terrible. Just a bunch of young adults with generic tastes showing off their bungalows. It 95% mid-century modern done poorly. And once in a blue moon when someone with a nice house shows it off, they are savaged by all the frustrated, poor readers for being "too showy".
I 'm more of a fan of checking out people like Eric Cohler, Thomas O'Brien, or Jeffrey Billhuber and then trying to make a more affordable version of their spaces.

You could do the wood paneling in a condo if you owned it but it would likely be quite expensive. You'd probably do better to go for a dark paint or wallpaper and then add darker furniture. Although this look seems really expensive it doesn't always have to be if you have access to good antique shops in your area. Antiques are often much less expensive than new furniture, especially the type of new furniture you would need to get this look.

With that said, I'll eyeball the furniture and art in this room to give you a rough estimate of what you'd be looking at if you bought antiques:

So you'd be looking at somewhere in the ballpark of 12-15k minimum to furnish a room that looked like that unless you have a really, really strong relationship with an antique dealer or access to an antique dealer going out of business and wanting to get rid of stuff.